My previous question has to do with how to advance code review among the developers. Here I am interested in how the code review session should be carried out, so that both the reviewer and reviewed are feeling comfortable about it.

I have done some code review before, but the experience sucks big time. My previous manager would come to us-- on an ad hoc basis-- and tell us to explain our code to him. Since he wasn't very familiar with the code base, I spent a huge amount of times explaining just the most basic structure of my code to him. This took a long time and by the time we were done, we were both exhausted.

Then he would raise issues with my code. Most issues he raised were cosmetic in nature ( e.g, don't use region for this code block, change the variable name from xxx to yyy even though the later makes even less sense, and so on). We did this a few rounds, and the review session didn't derive much benefits for us, and we stopped.

What do you have to do, in order to make code review a natural, enjoyable, thought stimulating, bug-fixing and mutual-learning experience?